Where I live, weed has always been de-facto legal in that cops left you alone and nobody followed the rules. Then the government announced that they were thinking about letting the private sector handle the medical sales. People in this city took it to mean, go for it! It was a gold rush with a pot store popping up in every corner. So many opened up that the provincial government couldn't prosecute them, so they just left them alone while the federal government clarified the law. It was a wild-west-of-weed type of situation. Now things have settled down, and there's only a pot store in every other corner as the market saturated. It seems there was a similar trajectory there in regards to this controversial industry.
Yes, it sounds like that is the way things are going here, though I don't think it was decriminalized in the past. They made a point of charging the mandatory minimum for a lot of weed cases.